


Double Exposure

by rageprufrock



Category: Viewfinder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:39:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out that Takaba is not cut out for normal, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Exposure

Takaba ends up at the hospital.

Not for any good reason, like repeated anal rape, but to get the back of his head examined.

The attending gives him a weird look and asks how he managed to get an arcing cut along the curve of his skull, and Takaba has a morbid desire to know what the doctor would say if he answered, "I was tied to a faucet and getting fucked up the ass.  My head kept slamming against the bottom edge and the cut didn't seem to be healing on its own."

He tells the doctor he doesn't really know.

Takaba gets two stitches, some Tylenol three, and sleeps for eighteen hours when he goes home.  He wakes up noon the next day and there are tears still wet on his face; Takaba doesn't remember what he dreams anymore.

 *****

He graduated top of his class with a degree in photojournalism.  Takaba can do his share of writing, but he prefers the instant thousand words than to struggle with it in the Japanese language edition of Quark.  He's lost more than one girlfriend over the fact that he always smells like fixer, that his apartment is a makeshift darkroom that he happens to sleep and fuck in--not that there's been much fucking recently.

But sleep comes easier, Takaba finds, with a terrifying sort of darkness that sucks him underneath into a vacuum of thought.

If he wakes up the next day shaking, crying, grinding himself into the mattress, he dismisses it, curls his hand around his cock, and thinks about f-stops until he comes all over his stomach.

 *****

The thing about it is that it isn't a thing.  Which is confusing and traumatizing all on its own.

Takaba has no problems being around people, he doesn't shy away from older men in the workplace, not every hulking beast of a yakuza boss beneath a the edged façade of a business owner is someone waiting to shove him into a corner.

But there are strange moments, sudden and abrupt stops, a gasp or a familiar shadow or something so suffocating that he will fall to his knees, clutch at the floor.  As if a tidal of memory is pulling him underneath dark, cold water, like he's choking on it and feeling more and more faint, watching his fingers dissolve in glimmers of light.

The most tangible image he remembers from these moments is Asami's hands, large and smooth and erudite, like the cut of his shoulders and the line of his back.

 *****

Takaba thinks in photographs, and he thinks all the pictures of himself may be overexposed.

Recently, in his bathroom mirror, the reflection he sees is a bit pale, too-tired, a bit like he's about to fade right off of the page, right out of the air.

 *****

His friends at the Japan Times finally convince him that freelancing is for younger birds, and Takaba finds himself on somebody's semi-permanent payroll.  His first assignment is to cover a business conference in Akasaka, and he does his best to make the speaker shots look less like their fundamental component substance: shit.

But it'd weird and kind of nice, Takaba has to admit, to have a paycheck coming in every two weeks, so he opens a savings account and moves like he's always wanted to.  He's got a fully-stocked developing lab at the office now, and so his rooms don't even smell like fixer. 

He's maybe becoming a new person, because now when Takaba looks at himself in the mirror, all he sees is a young, confident smile, and no trace of the boy who was bent double for Asami at all.  He's starting to feel like a whole human being again.

When he smoothes his hand down to his cock in the shower, he thinks of lush mouths and dewy eyes, and not the slick gleam of metal.

 *****

After three months Takaba gets paranoid.  It's been too quiet, it's too good to last, and he ends up pulling a few strings with his friends who do that kind of thing--the cowboys, the other guys in the newsroom call them--and finds out that there's something going on in the Tokyo underground.

"Don't fuck with this, Takaba," Nobu warns him.  Nobu has been a newsrat for as long as newsrats have existed; he has scars over his thick knuckles and smokes as if his body processes nicotine and not oxygen.  Takaba has a suspicion that this is not an unfounded belief on his part.

A few days later, for lack of anything better to do with his idle hands, Takaba buys a pack of cigarettes, and sits at his window, trying to smoke long into the night.

They taste like Asami's mouth--dark and thick and cyanide-sweet.

 *****

But there's something irresistible about this, and Takaba has learned that the line between pleasure and pain in razor sharp like the blades in Asami's eyes.  He stays up nights wondering what's going on, and when one of Asami's Shinjuku clubs closes up, he feels a swell in his chest that is half-triumph, half-nausea, and mostly curiosity.

He debates going.  He knows where to find Asami, after all, knows hotel suites and upper-floor penthouses that Asami haunts, knows his home address.  Takaba could go looking, turn a smug smile when he finds Asami drinking his golden brandy from his crystal-cut glasses and looking a little ragged.

There's something attractive about the prospect: Asami ragged.

 *****

There's something telling about this Takaba has not considered, and the swell in his chest rises, rises, until he's laying in his bed in his new apartment thinking about his new life, and realizing with sudden, sick awareness that he has no idea what he's doing or why.

He gets the feeling that he is living a double-exposure, one picture laid out over another when some mechanism in the camera got stuck.  Takaba thinks that if he stop smoking, lets his vision clear, and examines his photographs, he will see ghost-images, parts of himself he has forgotten about, even though he thinks he has reconstructed them.

 *****

This would all be so much easier, Takaba thinks, if Asami seemed human to him.  If there were fault lines he could examine, imperfections on the smooth surface of Asami's undeniable vice.  Takaba wants to make a case for him, is starting to look for excuses, but he's always been better at talking with his camera than his mouth, and he can't take pictures of something he can't see.

But he's still scared.  Takaba thinks he'll always be scared.

 *****

Takaba has this one dream where he is working freelance at a business conference, taking masturbatory photographs of fogies and up-and-coming millionaires, and he bumps into Asami.  He looks the same, but less so, and Takaba is unfailingly, unrepentantly himself.  He wakes up from this every time grinding into his mattress.

This is not a good coping mechanism, Takaba admits, but Asami is not a good person.

 *****

All in all, seven months pass.

Takaba takes pictures and gets credited in a legitimate news source.  He no longer scrounges for hit or miss assignments from dirty cops and dirtier crooks, and his life is coming spectacularly together, just like everything in his head is falling spectacularly apart.

 *****

It's late November and orange-dusk outside when Takaba finds Asami sitting in his apartment, making tea and chainsmoking.  Takaba doesn't own an ashtray, so one of his elementary attempts at craft-making, a plate--maybe--has been sacrificed to the cause, and it takes Takaba a few minutes to wrap his mind around the idea of Asami  _doing_  anything aside from being menacing.

"I thought maybe you'd died," Takaba says.

Asami arches one brow at him.  By his elbow, tea is steeping. 

Also--Asami's sleeves are rolled up.  Perhaps, Takaba rationalizes, this is not really happening.  All things considered, it's far more likely that this is one long, hallucinogenic episode brought on by extended exposure to developing chemicals.

"No," Asami says shortly.  Not exactly kind, but benign.  "I've been otherwise occupied."  The mean smirk Takaba knows well steals across his face. 

"Were you anxious that I'd forgotten you?" Asami asks, voice still the same rough, rolling timbre.

"Hope springs eternal," Takaba snaps, and shuts the door behind him.  He leaves his shoes a mess in the entranceway, kicking at Asami's thousand-dollar Italian leather loafers out of sheer petty meanness, though really, it's not the time to assert his immaturity.

"Manners," Asami says reproachfully, but there's a smile on his mouth, and it's not at all mean.

Somehow, they end up sipping tea and watching television at Takaba's table.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" Takaba finally asks, when all the suspicion, tension, and uncertainty build up to something totally volcanic.  His fingers are itching for something, and he thinks it might be a cigarette but maybe not.

"Somebody bombed my apartment," Asami says mildly.  "Hell hath no fury like an angry Chinese man scorned."

Takaba rolls his eyes and changes the channel.

 *****

By one in the morning, Takaba is flagging and too tired to maintain his steel-muscled paranoia at Asami's presence.  He makes a stuttering, angry speech about how if Asami so much as glances at his bedroom door during the night, he'll regret it.  Takaba's sure at least  _something_ in his room can be turned into a murder weapon.

Asami seems to take it in stride, unwrapping another carton of cigarettes.

"I'll see you in the morning," he says, distracted by the late-night news.

I'll poison him, Takaba thinks angrily.  I'll do it with fixer.

 *****

Everybody in the newsroom seems to take note of Takaba's mood that day.  The girls giggle at him and the guys just give him raised eyebrows.  Takaba tries to ignore it but mostly he's haunted by the image of Asami Ryuuchi, making him breakfast, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

At lunch, he caves, grabs Nobu by the back of his collar, and drags him to the nearest sushi-ya.  The drone of the conveyer belt is just loud enough to turn every conversation into white noise, and Nobu starts hoarding ever dish of unagi that rolls past them.

"I'm going to tell you things, and you can tell me other things," Takaba says seriously.

Nobu stares at him.  "You're really fucking bad at this, kid," he says kindly.

Takaba ignores him.  "What the hell is going on with Asami Ryuuchi?"

"Huh," Nobu says with interest.  "I didn't know you knew about him."

"Yakuza, clubs in Shinjuku, very rich, twisted fucker," Takaba snaps off.  "What's going on?"

Nobu's eyebrow rises, like he's figuring out that maybe Takaba is serious about this.  "And what were the things that you were going to tell me?" he asks casually.

"Not until I see if you can give me any information that I don't already have," Takaba says.  He's hoping for something like, "Recent underground medical information has revealed that Asami Ryuuchi actually suffers from a severe form of schizophrenia.  Occasionally, he forgets that he's Satan's asshole.  Lithium will help."

"Big rumble in little Tokyo," Nobu offers, chewing around his words.  "Chinese mafia is not happy at our resident oyaji, rumor has it it's an old grudge--maybe Asami got a little too friendly with somebody's wife."  Nobu laughs uproariously at this.

This brings up the image of Asami setting down a bowl of miso soup in front of him, the tofu badly mangled, and he has to shake his head to dislodge it.

"Anyway, there's been a major turf war, Asami suffered a few major personnel losses and no one's seen hide nor hair of him for about a week now," Nobu goes on, snorting and adding, "If you want my guess, he's either out of the country already or shacked up with one of his whores."

Takaba makes a choking noise, but manages to restrain himself. 

"Now, it's your turn," Nobu says seriously.

Takaba rubs at his forehead.  "Well, somebody blew up his apartment."

Nobu stares.  "You're fucking with me."

"God," Takaba mutters.  "I only wish."

 *****

Takaba finds every possible excuse to stay late at work, but it's a good day at the paper, the pages have been sent to the printer downstairs already, all the images are in focus, and the photo editor throws a box of old film at Takaba, threatening to drown Takaba in developer if he doesn't stop driving people crazy and leave.

So Takaba takes the long way home, hangs around a Lawson's until the girl at the counter gets suspicious and Takaba buys some food out of guilt, and gives up--heading home.

He finds it cleaner than he left it and Asami asleep in his bed.  Asami's shoulders are huge, as smooth and brown and strong as Takaba remembers, though mostly his memories of Asami's body are by sense only.  Sometimes he thinks he can feel the line of Asami's stomach under his hands, the vein on the underside of Asami's cock hot and strange and pulsing on this tongue, the lush lower lip of Asami's wicked mouth where Takaba's neck meets his shoulder.

Takaba realizes this is moment in which it is important to take stock of his life:

He is young and well-employed, though he no longer has his anal virginity and a significant percent of mafia groups across Asia either view him as their boss' bitch or number one target.  Also, he has a yakuza boss in his bed, drooling on the pillowcases his mother bought for him. 

"This is fucking ridiculous," Takaba whispers under his breath.

He sleeps on his couch.

Somewhere, lost in his chest and thick in the confusion, he's still scared.

 *****

When Takaba wakes up at half past six the next morning, he peeks into his bedroom to find Asami hissing angrily into his cell phone, half leaning out of Takaba's bedroom window, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  He looks disheveled and poorly-rested and real, all wrinkled and irate, like a cat that's been stroked the wrong way.  Takaba's a little amazed that Asami can be like this at all--Asami is sleek, flawless, fine, and in their interludes, Takaba has conveniently forgotten that he is human.

Asami ends the phone call, and Takaba is rooted to his spot in the doorway, when Asami notices him, he almost looks embarrassed.

"I didn't mean to wake you," he says.

"You didn't," Takaba replies lightly.  He searches around for something to say and when he comes up empty, he motions toward the kitchen.

Takaba scrounges together something for breakfast while Asami glares at the wall, apparently deep in thought about something other than infuriating, humiliating, and violating Takaba--for once.  It's weirdly annoying not to be the center of his attention, so Takaba makes sure that Asami's cup of coffee is only lukewarm when he passes it over.

Their fingers brush, and Asami's mouth folds automatically into a tight smile at that.  It is not triumphant at all.  He glances up just long enough to murmur, "Thanks," and turns back to the wall.

A few minutes later, when Asami's cell phone rings, Asami sloshes coffee all over his hand in his haste to answer it and yell.  He gives Takaba a look that says, 'my apologies for the rudeness,' and stalks over to a window to mutter darkly at some subordinate who Takaba feels for deeply.

When Takaba leaves for work, Asami says, "Have a nice day."

Takaba finds this strangely endearing, and something in his chest begins to loosen.

 *****

At the end of the next day, Takaba only loiters at Lawson's long enough to pick up a few groceries before getting back to his apartment to find Asami even more disheveled than Takaba left him that morning.

Takaba makes omelets, and Asami watches, huge and looming as always.

"When are you going back to your apartment?" he demands the fourth time he bumps into Asami while cooking.

"There's a hole in it," Asami says, matter-of-factly.  "Shrapnel, bits of cement everywhere."

"I don't see your point," Takaba mutters.

Asami cocks a brow.  "I think you've changed, Akihito."

"You're just imagining it," Takaba barks, glaring, and dishes up the omelets, dropping one plate in front of Asami while saying, "And if I find you in my bed again, I swear to God, I will roll you out."

Asami smirks, and there's nothing mean about it.

 *****

It's now been a week that Asami's been living with him.  He's kept his hands to himself, attempted to be helpful, and been mostly harmless.  He spends a lot of time on his cell phone, either giving very strange directions or yelling very scary things.  Takaba plays a lot of Grand Theft Auto and ignores everything going on around him, and occasionally, he and Asami will touch by accident and it will make Asami smile.

There's something loosening in Takaba's chest, making him feel brave.  He's not so scared anymore.

On Saturday morning, Takaba wakes up to find Asami crashed out asleep on his bed, atop the sheets and still dressed.  His arm is extended and his fingers are touching Takaba's.  It feels strange and strangely intimate.  I should have killed him when I had the chance, Takaba thinks, scrambling out from underneath the covers.

As promised, Takaba rolls him out.

Asami looks as if he's about to do something typical of somebody who rules the Tokyo underworld when he stops himself, and says, almost thoughtfully, "You did warn me."

"I totally did," Takaba retorts.

 *****

It's nearly nightfall by the time Asami finally sets down his cell phone, on the ground near Takaba's cameracase, where Asami's cell-phone charger is plugged in.  Night has seeped into the sky, and Tokyo is abrasive and bright outside the windows.

"I suppose I owe you a hot tip for your hospitality," Asami says, conversational.

All the things Takaba is afraid of are in Asami's voice again, and this is a change he doesn't like.

"I don't want it," Takaba says immediately.  He barely registers the mild surprise on Asami's face.  "It's not worth it."

"The story isn't worth your time?" Asami asks, curious.

Takaba scowls.  "Not if I can't look myself in the mirror anymore."

"I see," Asami says thoughtfully.

They don't talk after that.

 *****

By Sunday morning, Asami is gone.  His house is spotless, and on his kitchen counter, there is a note in surprisingly ragged handwriting.  It reads, "Come round sometime.  I'll tell you stories you won't write about."  Asami signs "あ" in Hiragana, as if he's a fourteen year old girl.

The next day, Takaba finds an antique camera on his desk at the office.  It's gorgeous and amazing and probably worth millions of dollars.  When he looks through the viewfinder, he sees the Tokyo skyline, and when he gets home, he calls around until a friend of a friend of a friend tells Takaba that the club in Shinjuku has opened again, that Asami Ryuuchi is back.

Takaba sleeps like the dead that night.  He wakes up Tuesday to pore over the newspaper and finds a few lines here and there that look suspicious, but mostly, the world seems to have accepted the latest turn of events with no notice.

Takaba wonders, though.

 *****

It keeps him up that, the idea of Asami's slick apartment bombed out like a demolition site.  He wonders what the hell Asami ended up doing about the scorned Chinese man.  He wonders why Asami came to him, why Asami stayed so long, when he probably had places to be and people to do.  Takaba wonders most of all, though, why he bothers wondering.

Asami has left his marks on Takaba, but nowhere Takaba can see.

 *****

It turns out that Takaba is not cut out for normal, after all.

Takaba still doesn't know what Asami did to him, or why him at all, but the normal isn't working for him, maybe it was never supposed to.  He's spent all this time puttering around his apartment smelling Asami's surprisingly cheap cigarettes and paying for his distraction and it's got to end.

It's not that he's not scared anymore, but fear is a relative thing, and what fear he has of Asami's dark, merciless eyes and cruel, smooth hands has been shifted into fear of what he'll do of his own volition, of what this has become.  That's still fear, and he can hear his heart racing.

But he feels alive, like he's chasing the perfect photo or a thousand words to clear all of this up.

So it's on a Tuesday that he takes his antique camera and goes to Asami's "Shion" club in Shinjuku.  He has questions and a free pass into the place now--all the men at the door know him, defer when he walks in ratty jeans and a Ramones t-shirt.   He ignores the curious looks and whispers when he winds his way through the main room of the club and into the VIP lounges, where people open doors for him and usher him into the dark, cool quiet.

Asami is waiting.  His sleeves are rolled up.


End file.
